


(dis)illusion

by wave_of_sorrow



Series: the imagination for reality [11]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fix-It, Multi, Not A Fix-It, What Happens When I Try To Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-01
Updated: 2013-01-01
Packaged: 2017-11-18 08:57:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/559168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wave_of_sorrow/pseuds/wave_of_sorrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which the Tenth Doctor and Rose Tyler go back for Jack Harkness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(dis)illusion

**Author's Note:**

> This is what happens when I decide to write Ten/Jack/Rose, i.e. not the porny mechanics of how the established threesome would change after Nine regenerates. FML, you guys.
> 
> Bits at the beginning and end from W.B. Yeats' _A Man Young And Old: III. The Mermaid_

 

_“Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion.”  
_ Miguel de Unamuno

_a mermaid found a swimming lad,_  
 _picked him for her own,_  
 _pressed her body to his body;  
_ _laughed,_

It’s been a month since 1941 and the nanogenes, and far out on the frozen sea of Woman Wept Rose presses an icy kiss to Jack’s lips. She laughs at the confusion on his face, and the Doctor grins and takes their hands, and they walk back to the TARDIS under the motionless waves. They spend the remainder of the day in the library, cradling cups of tea between their cold palms and sharing stories, and then kisses.

After three months of travelling in the TARDIS Jack gets shot in the leg as he shoves Rose out of the way, and somehow it ends with first Rose and then the Doctor snogging the hell out of him while he’s supposed to keep his leg elevated.

A week after they take Jack with them the Doctor takes his hand when he’s about to go to bed and leads him to Rose’s room instead, and she follows wordlessly and automatically. Jack doesn’t quite understand why they’re doing this, but who’s he to turn down sex with two hot people? After, when he’s sprawled out with his head on the Doctor’s stomach he starts to feel worried, and pretends he’s asleep when Rose tangles her legs with his and the Doctor scratches behind his ear.

The Doctor and Rose take Jack with them, and though the Doctor’s hostility develops into something less biting and kinder, the tension never really goes out of him. Likewise, though Rose’s obvious and unrefined flirting turns into something more like companionship, she never quite stops trying. As for Jack, he keeps his comments inappropriate and just short of crass but never makes good on them, and that’s that. Except, sometimes Rose looks at him like she wants to say something no one from her time has words for, or the Doctor gathers the two of them in a tight hug and holds on for a moment too long. In the end, that’s all there ever is between them, and Jack only kisses them once: goodbye.

There are as many ways of how the Doctor, Jack and Rose did and/or didn’t become _the Doctor, Jack and Rose_ as there are universes, and this is one of them.

*

Five days after Jack joins the TARDIS crew the Doctor corners him in the wardrobe room where he’s trying on a pair of tight jeans seeing as all of Jack’s clothes blew up along with his ship, and says, “Rose thinks you’re pretty.”

Jack stops checking out his own arse, and meets the Doctor’s eyes in the mirror. He sees himself grin, and says, “Can you blame her?”

The Doctor crosses his arms, and scowls at Jack, and he says, “What’re you gonna do about it?”

“Do you want me to describe it to you?” Jack asks with a leer, and the Doctor’s scowl only deepens. He sighs, and pulls a jacket from one of the vast shelves lining the room, and eventually he says, “I don’t know, Doc. She seemed kind of taken with you, you know.”

The Doctor pulls a face, and says, “I don’t like it when you call me that.”

“I know,” Jack says, and grins at him unrepentantly.

“You still haven’t answered my question,” the Doctor says, and steps closer to him. “What do you plan to do about Rose?”

“What do you want me to do about it?” Jack asks, and takes another step forward so they’re almost chest-to-chest. The corner of the Doctor’s mouth tilts upward, and he looks torn between amusement and intrigue, and it makes Jack’s cock twitch in his jeans. The Doctor’s grin widens, and Jack grins right back as he puts his hands on the Doctor’s hips and leans in until their noses bump.

He can feel the Doctor shift into a more comfortable position, and he watches him tilt his head slightly and lick his lips, and the amused glint hasn’t disappeared from his eyes. “I think I’d rather you do something about this, Captain,” he murmurs against Jack’s mouth and takes one of his hands off his hip to press against the front of his trousers. It’s a bold move and the Doctor is entirely unapologetic and unabashed about it, and Jack makes an involuntary sound low in his throat as the hand covering his squeezes.

“Don’t I have a say in any of this?” Rose asks from the doorway, and they hastily break apart only to find her grinning at them with her tongue caught between her teeth.

“Rose,” the Doctor starts, and then has to clear his throat when his voice comes out scratchy, and Rose’s grin just widens.

She crosses her arms and leans back against the door, and says, “Go on, then. Don’t stop on my account.”

Jack grins, because of her bravado and her obvious excitement at seeing the two of them together and the blush she’s trying to cover up with being daring, and leans in to lick up the side of the Doctor’s neck. “Whatever you want, Rose,” he says against the Doctor’s jaw before biting down, and the Doctor gasps and yanks him away.

For a moment they just look at each other, Jack grinning and the Doctor scowling, and then they’re kissing. It’s hard and uncontrolled; a lot of teeth and grinding hips, and when the Doctor tips Jack’s head back and trails stinging bites down his throat he holds his hand out to Rose. She comes to them wordlessly, and threads the fingers of one hand through the Doctor’s where he’s cradling Jack’s skull in his palm, and her breathing is quick and shallow.

She touches her fingertips to the red imprints of the Doctor’s teeth on Jack’s neck, and Jack inhales sharply. Rose looks up at him with wide eyes, and all he can manage is a shaky grin and a shakier, “Don’t stop.” The Doctor bites down hard, and Jack hisses, “Please.”

Rose’s grin is wicked as she bends her head to lick over the bite marks already littering Jack’s throat, and when her tongue twines with the Doctor’s even as they keep mauling his neck Jack’s hips buck and he moans helplessly. They start kissing around his skin, in between bites and soothing licks, and when they finally let go of Jack to have a proper snog it’s nothing short of beautiful.

The Doctor kisses her more gently than he kissed Jack, but she stands on her toes and bites down on his lip until he hisses and pulls back. “Not so hard, Rose,” he admonishes, and she just laughs at him and does it again.

Jack loves to watch, especially when it’s people as gorgeous and brilliant as them he’s watching, but he can’t resist kissing the soft curve of Rose’s neck and dipping his fingers just below the Doctor’s waistband to feel him tense. The Doctor’s jacket is the first thing to go, tugged off and flung away by two insistent pairs of hands, and while they’re all trying to toe their shoes off without breaking contact he nudges the two of them together in a rather unsubtle attempt to make them kiss.

Rose opens her mouth under Jack’s almost immediately, and he doesn’t comply, presses damp, close-mouthed kisses against her parted lips instead and pulls back when she licks at him until she complains. “Jack,” she says, and it comes out as a frustrated whine.

He chuckles and nips her lower lip, and the Doctor squeezes the back of his neck and says, “Jack. Kiss her.”

He does kiss her, then; his tongue in her mouth and hers in his, and he doesn’t think he’s kissed or been kissed like that since he was an over-excited boy, and it’s exhilarating. He cups her arse in his hands and pulls her in, and she gasps as he pushes his erection against her belly.

Jack pulls back, and tries to catch her eye, and he has to take a few breaths before he can speak with Rose still pressed against his front and the Doctor rubbing himself against his hip. “You okay with this, Rose?”

“Shut up and kiss me again,” she says, and it’s breathless and pitched lower than her normal voice, and it’s good enough for Jack.

They do it right there in the wardrobe room that first time, and it’s all excitement and uncoordinated caresses, and when the Doctor pushes Rose’s shirt and bra out of the way to suck on the curve of her breast, Jack drops to his knees and sucks on the Doctor’s cock instead. He uses all the tricks he knows; slips his tongue under the foreskin to circle the head, takes him right down deep into his throat, and sucks until the Doctor’s hips buck and his hand goes tight around the back of Jack’s neck.

When he looks up it’s to find the Doctor with his face hidden against Rose’s shoulder and Rose watching him avidly with her boobs still spilling out of her shirt and the heel of her hand pressed between her legs. He’d grin if it wasn’t for the Doctor’s cock in his mouth, and tugs Rose’s trousers down to her knees so he can rub his fingers against the damp cotton of her knickers.

Her hips twitch, and she makes a soft sound, and Jack lets the Doctor slip from his mouth. “Doc,” he says, and leisurely strokes his spit-slick cock until he’s got his attention. “Give Rose a hand, will you?”

The Doctor doesn’t say anything, instead he kisses Rose and slides his hand into her underwear, and Jack rewards him by taking him all the way in again.

That’s how they first come together: the Doctor in Jack’s mouth and Rose against the Doctor’s hand, and later Jack inside of Rose.

*

“I hate it when you do that,” Rose tells Jack once, when they’ve just come back to the TARDIS after a night out at a forty-second century club.

“Do what?” Jack asks, although he already knows she’s referring to him going off to shag in the loo.

“Aren’t we enough for you?” she asks, and scowls at her bitten fingernails.

Jack shrugs, and looks at the Doctor for help, but he’s studiously pretending to be busy at the console. Eventually he says, “I don’t really do exclusive, Rose.” She looks hurt at that, and he almost wishes he could take the words back.

“Not even for me?” she asks, and he realises he’s made the mistake of forgetting how very young she is. “For us?”

Jack rubs a hand over his mouth, and walks over to her to take her hands in his, and he says, “I can do exclusive for you.”

Rose beams at him, and the Doctor doesn’t look at him and says, “Good lad,” and he realises he’s made another mistake: falling for them.

*

“Don’t even think about it, lad,” the Doctor says, and Jack sighs and rolls his tense shoulders as he stops by the ramp leading to the TARDIS front door.

“Think about what, Doc?” he asks without turning around, and he doesn’t think playing dumb’s going to get him out of this but he’ll try anything twice.

“Running,” the Doctor says, and there’s the sound of his boots on the metal grating and he puts his hand on Jack’s shoulder to spin him around. “Come back to bed.”

“I can’t,” Jack says, and he can’t meet the Doctor’s eyes either. “I think it’s time for me to go.”

“Oh, you think that, do you?” the Doctor says, and his voice is condescending but his hand slides up to cup Jack’s jaw.

Jack closes his eyes and takes a deep breath through his nose, and answers on a sigh, “Yeah.”

The Doctor hums, and his clothing rustles as he shifts slightly, and when he speaks again his voice sounds closer. “Why’s that, then? And don’t give me any of that _we had a good time but that’s all it was_ rubbish. I want the real reason.”

Jack keeps his eyes closed, and says, “But that _is_ all it was.”

“Bullshit,” the Doctor says, and Jack opens his eyes to find him further away than expected. “You’re scared because it’s more than that, so you’re doing what you always do when things get tough: you run.”

Jack shrugs him off, and says, “Fuck off, Doctor.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he says, and he’s being his infuriatingly superior self complete with that vague amusement he keeps so badly hidden just under the surface. “You’d love it if I just bought your bullshit and let you swan off like the coward you are.”

“I am not a coward,” Jack hisses, and his jaw hurts from where he’s been grinding his teeth together.

“Course you’re not,” the Doctor says, mocking and far too amused by all this. “You just like to do the easy thing and save your own arse before anybody else’s, that’s all. That doesn’t make you a coward.”

“You don’t know anything about me,” Jack says, and bares his teeth in an involuntary snarl.

The Doctor gives him a lopsided grin, and says, “Yeah, maybe not. But I know what it looks like when someone runs because they’re too scared of what could happen if they stayed.”

“Yeah?” Jack asks, hostile and defensive, and he wishes the Doctor would just let him go.

“Yeah,” the Doctor says, soft and honest, and just like that all the fight goes out of Jack.

He sighs, and leans back against the nearest coral strut, and says, “Fuck.”

The Doctor’s grin is wry and he pats Jack’s arm, and says, “Happens to the best of us.”

“It does?” Jack asks, and the Doctor nods. “So, what do I do now?”

The Doctor shrugs, and comes to stand alongside him, and says, “Haven’t got the faintest.” Jack snorts, and the Doctor crosses his arms and fixes him with a mock-stern look. “You could always tell her, you know.”

“That I, what, _love_ her?” Jack asks with a disgusted expression, and meets the Doctor’s eye only long enough to raise a sanity-questioning eyebrow at him. “Yeah, I don’t think so.”

The Doctor huffs out a humourless laugh, and says, “I meant that it’s not going to make you happy.” Jack frowns at him, and he goes on, “Yeah, sure, it’s making you pretty happy right now, getting to shag her and getting me to fuck you whenever you feel like it, but how long’s that gonna last?”

“Do you really have that little faith in me?” Jack asks, and the Doctor’s expression says it all. He pushes away from the coral strut, and crosses the control room to the corridor leading deeper into the TARDIS.

“Where do you think you’re going, then?” the Doctor asks from behind him, and Jack can practically _hear_ the frowny face he’s making.

“Bed,” he says, and doesn’t bother to slow down or turn around. “You coming?”

“Yup,” the Doctor says cheerfully, and is right next to him quicker than should be possible even for nine hundred year old aliens with a penchant for running.

“Bastard,” Jack mutters good-naturedly, and the Doctor’s unrepentant grin only widens.

“There you are,” Rose says when they enter what was once Jack’s bedroom and is now _theirs,_ and tosses her half-read magazine away to join its brothers on the floor. “Took you longer than usual today, I was getting worried.”

Jack opens his mouth to explain, and the Doctor shuts him up with a slap on the arse as he passes him on his way to join Rose in bed. She grins and rolls her eyes when he stretches out on the opposite side with a self-satisfied expression, and she pats the spot between them and holds out her hand to Jack like it’s all right, and maybe it is.

*

They leave him, in the end; on a satellite filled with corpses and the dust of time, memories and a faulty Vortex manipulator his only companions. Jack does what he always does: he moves on.

*

The TARDIS materialises in the middle of the Hub main floor, stirring up loose papers and sending haphazard stacks of files flying. By the time everything has more or less settled again, Jack’s made it down from his office and the blue doors have opened to reveal Rose, backlit by the eerie light of the timeship.

When she sees him her face splits into a blinding grin, and she says, “Jack!” She’s across the room and in his arms before he’s even had time to process the fact that _she’s here._

“Rose,” Jack says, and she buries her face in his neck and makes a soft sound. “Oh, Rose.”

“Captain,” the Doctor acknowledges from where he’s leaning in the TARDIS doorway, and he looks as grim as Rose looked happy.

“Doctor,” Jack says, and there’s only a hint of uncertainty in his voice. He’s seen the files on him, on every him, but wrapping his head around the flimsy theories Torchwood and UNIT have drawn up to explain the Doctor’s changing appearance is even more difficult when face-to-face with the undisputable fact.

Rose pulls back slightly to be able to look Jack in the eye, but doesn’t let go of him, and says, “I’m sorry.”

Jack frowns, and tries to wipe the steady flow of tears and smudging mascara from her cheeks, and doesn’t understand. “Hey,” he says, and cups her sad face in his palms, “it’s okay, sweetheart.”

Rose’s face contorts, and she chokes on a sob as she shakes her head. “We left you behind,” she says, and it comes out wet and ragged and like it hurts her.

“Oh, Rose,” Jack says, and gathers her close. He holds her as she cries, and the Doctor stays where he is, with his hands in his pockets and his eyes averted, like he wants to give them some privacy in this undignified display of human emotion, and Jack wants to hate him for it. “It’s okay,” he tells Rose, and it’s surprising how easy it is to say those words. “It’s okay, Rose.”

She hiccoughs, and mumbles into his chest, “I’ve missed you.”

“I missed you, too,” Jack says, and closes his eyes against the flood of memories her scent triggers.

It is four o’clock in the morning on the twenty-sixth of December 2006, and Rose Tyler smells exactly like she did one-hundred-fifty years ago and two-hundred-thousand years in the future, and Jack never did move on.

*

Sat around the table in the little kitchen area of the Hub with cups of cooling tea between them, the Doctor says, “Come with us, Jack.”

Jack takes a long look around himself, at the uncategorised alien artefacts and the discarded sweet wrappers, turns back to Rose’s expectantly happy face and the Doctor’s unfamiliar one, and does what he always does when things get tough. He says, “Yeah, okay.”

*

Life in the TARDIS is exactly as Jack remembered it, minus the mock-gruff rebukes in a Northern accent, and it’s incredibly easy to fall back into the once-familiar routine. They set coordinates, and miss by two centuries and seven planets. The Doctor assures them they’re visiting one of the most peaceful worlds in all the cosmos, and five minutes later he tells them to _run._ Jack makes too many inappropriate remarks and earns himself countless _stop it_ s and smiles that don’t quite reach the Doctor’s eyes, and Rose grins with her tongue caught between her teeth.

It’s easy to pretend nothing’s changed, when, in fact, everything has.

They’re different people now, all of them irrevocably changed in some way, and the Doctor in the most obvious, and funnily enough, least significant.

Still, they make do: save a world or three, stage a few revolutions at the right time on the right planet, buy pretty, useless trinkets on alien market places, and laugh as they make another mad dash back to the TARDIS.

The change in their relationship is only really noticeable at the end of the day, when Rose says _g’night_ and the Doctor sees her off with a soft _see you in the morning_ and Jack says nothing at all.

*

In retrospect, Jack thinks he should have known better than to expect the Doctor to warm to him with time. He made that mistake once before, when the Doctor still wore a leather jacket and an unhappy scowl, and back then it only got him a stern talking-to.

It isn’t much different now, even with the new face that’s mostly inhumanly expressive eyebrows and freckles, and it’s a painful blow to something inside Jack that is too small and well-protected to be his ego.

“I’m sorry,” the Doctor says, and doesn’t sound like he really means it. “But I can’t help it.”

“Right,” Jack says, and leaves the console room, feeling wrong.

The only thing that’s different is that Jack’s too old, now, to react with reckless smiles and daring kisses.

*

“Come to bed, Jack,” Rose says, when she’s cornered him in the kitchen three days later.

“Nah, it’s okay,” he says, and puts the kettle on for lack of anything better to do. “You go ahead, I’m not really tired anyway.”

She makes a noise that’s half-sigh, half-snort, and says, “’s not what I meant.”

He pretends he hasn’t heard her, and roots through the cupboards until she presses her front to his back, trapping him against the counter. He says, “Rose.”

Her arms come around him, and her hands slip under his shirt so she can drag her nails across the skin just above his waistband, and he lets out a long breath. “Come to _bed,_ Jack,” she says again, her voice pitched lower, and raises herself on her toes to nip at the back of his neck.

He turns in the circle of her arms, and takes her hands to kiss her palms, before he pushes her away. “I’m not in the mood, Rose,” he lies, and smiles while he does it.

“Yeah, right,” she says with a roll of the eyes, and then deflates a little. “Don’t you want us anymore?” she asks, and sounds terribly young, and Jack forgot how much he hates it when she does that.

“Of course I want you, Rose,” he says, and unceremoniously puts her hand on his half-hard cock through his jeans. “Of _course_ I want you.”

“Then why won’t you touch us?” she asks, not meeting his eyes, and plays with one of his belt loops. “I miss being touched by you.”

Jack smiles at her admission, and it’s fond and a little sad and nothing like how he used to smile at her. He says, “I miss that, too.”

“Then why can’t we?” Rose asks, stubborn and pouting, and he lets her tug him closer until their hips bump.

“Look, I really don’t mind the way things are right now,” he says, and it’s so terribly untrue it hurts. “I’m happy if you and the Doc are happy. You don’t have to include me in that.”

He brushes a quick kiss across her forehead, and then turns away to save the boiling kettle.

Behind him, Rose says, “But we’re not.”

“Sorry, what?” Jack says before he can think better of it, and turns back to find her biting her lip and looking mortified.

“We’ve not,” she pulls a face and blushes adorably, “you know, since _before_.”

“Oh,” he says, because he’s seen the two of them disappear into and reappear from the same bedroom more often than not since they picked him up over a month ago.

“Yeah,” Rose says, and chews on her thumbnail.

“Why not?” Jack asks, and she looks at him like he’s a complete idiot.

“Because it was always the three of us together,” she says, like it’s obvious, “never just two.”

“Oh,” Jack says again, and what he really means is _but that was before_ and _he doesn’t want me anymore_ and _I don’t think I can._

“Come to bed, Jack,” the Doctor says, and Jack and Rose spin around to find him leaning in the doorway.

Jack looks at him, and Rose looks between them, and then he says, “Okay, yeah,” and pours the boiled water down the drain.

*

With the three of them in bed together it’s like that first time in the wardrobe room of the TARDIS all over again, except that it isn’t. Where, back then, the Doctor was confident and Rose was excitable and Jack just plain went for it there’s so much more baggage now.

Kissing is easy enough; Rose kisses the Doctor and then twists her head to kiss Jack over her shoulder, and with a bit of nudging they kiss each other with her trapped between their bodies. It only really gets complicated once their clothes are off and Rose lies back on the bed with the Doctor’s hand moving lazily between her legs, and Jack realises he has no idea what to do.

Before, when the Doctor’s ears were bigger and his hair shorter, Jack would lick down his spine just to make him groan and arch his back. He’d bite his neck to have him growl and flip them over. He’d deliberately annoy him just to be held down and spanked with his head in Rose’s lap and her hand rubbing soothing patterns across his shoulders. He’d hold her against his chest and narrate everything as the Doctor went down on her just to hear him moan against her and watch her toes curl. He’d wrestle him half-heartedly to get him to fuck him raw, to stop him being so fucking _kind,_ and then Rose would hold his hand and lie next to him as the Doctor took him so excruciatingly slowly all he could do was bite the pillow to stop the keening noises escaping his throat.

Now, that the Doctor is thinner and his arms hairier, Jack only knows how to touch Rose, and so that’s what he does. Vaguely, in the way that one wishes for things one knows one will never have, he wishes he had what she has: a permanent place in the Doctor’s hearts.

She seems a little overwhelmed by it all, by the Doctor tonguing her clit as Jack’s thumb works her g-spot, but she also seems quite happy about it if her orgasm, loud and long and wet against Jack’s palm, is anything to go by. After the Doctor coaxes another one from her, her back arching and her tongue in Jack’s mouth and her hands holding the Doctor’s head in place as she rides it out on his face, she shoves them off with a ragged whimper.

“Stop, stop, stop,” she pants, closing her legs and rolling away from them a little. “I can’t anymore. That’s, I can’t, enough.”

“Need a break?” Jack asks, and when she looks at him, flushed and sweaty and a little strung out, he feels a once-familiar lazy grin spread over his face.

“Why don’t you two go ahead without me?” she says, foot rubbing the back of the Doctor’s leg and fingers spidering up Jack’s ribcage. “Not sure if I’ll be up for anything more tonight.”

Jack kisses her, a bit because she’s wonderful and brave and happy in ways he doesn’t think he can ever be again, but mostly because he really, actually doesn’t know what to do, here, without her.

He hears the Doctor rummage around in his nightstand, and Jack has to remind himself that it’s only been a few days for them and that they probably know exactly where he last left the lube. It’s odd for him, being in this room that was once his and now feels like another person’s, and Jack isn’t sure if that person still exists. Rose nudges him back with a little smile then, nodding towards the Doctor, and Jack kisses her again to buy himself more time.

In the end she breaks away with a laugh and shoves him off, and just when he’s starting to wonder what it’s going to be like, being fucked by this Doctor, he finds the man in question having flopped down on his belly and regarding them with a strange expression.

He’s a little lost for a moment, then the lube is nudged towards him and he remembers that he’s Jack Harkness and if there’s one thing he knows how to do it’s this: fuck.

The Doctor is tight and quiet, but he’s hard and he makes the occasional soft noise when Jack gets the angle just right. It’s horribly, horribly slow, and then Jack leans forward to bite the side of his neck and suddenly it’s all terribly, terribly frantic and loud and Rose holds his hand, just like old times, and Jack wishes he had a pillow to hide his face in.

*

Jack finds the Doctor in the control room, back in his suit and studying the monitor with glasses perched on his nose, and he says, “She made you come and get me, didn’t she?”

The Doctor sniffs, and frowns, and doesn’t look up when he says, “Yeah.”

Jack’s smile is bitter and like knowing what the Doctor’s answer was going to be didn’t make hearing it any easier, and the next words come out anyway. “You wouldn’t have come back for me, would you?”

The Doctor stops pretending to be busy, and leans back against the console with his arms crossed in front of him and his face pinched into the expression of a long-suffering teacher who has yet again been disappointed by the pupil whose potential he insists on, though he can’t remember why. He studies Jack for a few moments, and then rubs a hand over his mouth and averts his eyes when he says, “No, probably not.”

Jack chuckles, and says, “I kind of figured that.”

“Then why are you asking?” the Doctor asks, short-tempered and repellent and like he wasn’t drooling onto the pillow as Jack fucked him just a few hours ago.

Jack shrugs and spreads out his arms, and says, “No idea, Doc.”

The Doctor shoots him an angry look at the sound of the nickname he’s never liked, though Jack doesn’t think he’s ever properly hated it like he does now, and he says, “I’ve got to check something in the library.”

“You’re really just gonna do what you always do when things get tough, Doc?” Jack asks as the Doctor pushes past him, and it gets him a face full of annoyed Time Lord but at least he’s stopped running for the moment.

“And you’re _really_ going to throw my own words back at me, _lad_?” he asks, and it comes out as a vicious snarl.

“I’m not sure, it’s been a while for me since we had that conversation,” Jack says, softer and more honest than anything he’s said to the Doctor since the year 200,100.

The Doctor’s expression reluctantly softens, and then he turns away with a growl to tug at his hair and scrub his hands over his face and ineffectually kick at the metal grating of the floor. “ _Why_ do you have to make this so hard on me, Jack?” Jack smirks and opens his mouth to make a dirty quip, but before he can say anything the Doctor’s waving his hands and saying, “No, no, no. Don’t. Just, _don’t_.”

Jack holds up his hands in feigned surrender, and protests, “I didn’t say anything!”

“Yes, well,” the Doctor says, and the stare he fixes Jack with is much more like the mock-stern ones he used to give him, back when his eyes were blue.

Jack says, “She doesn’t know, does she?”

The Doctor sighs, and looks away. “I haven’t told her, no.”

Jack’s smile has no humour in it, and with the light of the TARDIS controls throwing strange shadows across his face he looks as old as he is. “Coward,” he accuses, and there’s no heat in it; it’s tired and resigned, and like he’s known for a long time.

The Doctor says nothing, and with even the anger drained from his face he just looks worn out.

“So, what do we do about it?” Jack asks after a while, leaning back against the railing.

The Doctor shrugs, pulls a face and rubs the back of his neck. “We tell her, I suppose,” he says, and looks like he really doesn’t want to.

“Right,” Jack says, and misses the man who taught him not to run even if it’s easier, _especially_ if it’s easier.

*

Later, when Rose joins them in the control room, Jack tells her how he died and how he didn’t stay dead. The Doctor doesn’t look at them as he says there’s nothing he can do, and Rose cries. Jack holds her and tells her it’s okay, and he thinks that before, when things were still fantastic, it would have been the Doctor doing this. But that’s okay, too.

They don’t tell her, and this is how she finds out: when he’s killed right in front of her and blood splatters against her face. She screams, and then screams louder when he sits up with a gasp, and she hates them both for lying to her.

The Doctor explains it to her, and she looks sad and confused where she’s curled up between them on the sofa in the library. She kisses Jack, like she wants to say she’s sorry but can’t because she isn’t, and she promises to never let him die again. She refuses to accept that there’s a difference between her death and all of Jack’s, and this is how she dies: on the moon of a faraway planet to save a man who lives forever.

They never tell her, and she never finds out; she spends the rest of her days trapped in a parallel universe and the Doctor and Jack Harkness part ways because, in a way, it was only ever her.

None of this ever happens, and/or all of it does.

*

Sitting at the TARDIS kitchen table, with the Doctor leaning against the counter and far too interested in the contents of his teacup, Jack says, “Rose, listen.”

She looks up from where she’s buttering her toast and frowns at him, concerned. “What’s wrong?”

Jack looks at her, young and joyful and burning golden in the faux early morning sunlight the ship provides them with, and he looks at the Doctor, old and unkind and carrying the weight of the universe on his shoulders because no one else will, and he can’t say what he has to.

“I love you,” he tells her, and it isn’t the truth she needs to hear but it’s the one she deserves. Rose’s smile is brighter than the sun, and she takes his hand. “I don’t think I ever told you that.”

“No, but it’s okay,” she says, and the Doctor squeezes Jack’s shoulder like _good lad,_ and Jack thinks that maybe it is.

_and plunging down_  
 _forgot in cruel happiness  
_ _that even lovers drown._


End file.
